Patch 3.0 memory hog?

Hey guys

Anyone else have problem running 5 WoW's on 1 computer after patch? For some reason i can start all 5 WoW's without problems, load 4 of them in game, but 5th freezes on load screen until i close 1 of the WoW's already loaded (if it didn't crash before that). Currently i have 3GB ram and even increased virtual memory size. Could this have something to do with my new craphics card? I upgraded my old Nvidia to Radeon 4850 when patch was released.

Pre-patch i could easily run 5 WoW's with 2GB ram.

Meant to post this at "Support" section. Sorry about that. ^^

If you're stuck at the loading screen, without even getting into the game...

I'd guess its not enough ram.
Your video card is easily strong enough for five wow clients, especially the loading screen.

Did yeh just make it into outlands?

the halloween stuff increased memory/garphics usage a tad.

All my toons are in 'the old world' and outside major citys, no addons atm.

Currently i've seen 2 different types of problems:
#1 After i get my 4th toon in game, i still have almost 1GB left on ram, but when i try to load 5th i get "Failed to read file..." error after awhile. I always wait for each WoW to load before starting with next one.

#2 Couple times even with only 4 WoW's running 1 of them freezes in load screen, BUT my toon IS in game, moving and jumping along others, i can hear Esc bring out game menu, etc. It only fails to show graphics for that particular window. This is why i was thinking it may have something to do with my gfxcard.

..but now as i'm writing this, for the first time after patch i was able to load all 5 wow's in game. Only thing i did differently was that i waited +5min after 4th was finished before attempting to load 5th. Any idea what could be wrong here? ^^

I've noticed a drop in all 3 of my PCs performance after the patch..I'm praying it's just the Halloween crap though. :S

My performance has gone to crap on my PC--2-boxing on it currently with 4G of RAM, a 8800GTS video card and a 3.0GHz Core 2 Duo and I constantly freeze/lock-up at inopportune times.

Building a new PC and moving off of Vista tomorrow--I'm interested to see if it resolves the hell that has been my PC for the past couple weeks. The past 48-hours have been unbearable.

Oddly enough, my husband's PC is almost my exact same build (better RAM) and he's having no issues with 2-boxing each evening.

well guys my performance has actually gone up since 3.0 hit!

possibly due to the fact that i put vista 64 on and got 2GB more memory :D

How are/were you running 5 with 2GB? I just finished loading 4 to test my machine (which has 2GB of memory) and I'm sitting at around 90-95% memory usage and I've gone through and tweaked vista, stopped unnecessary process', etc.

edit: Nevrmind, read your post wrong. Does anyone know if it's even possible to run 5 with 2GB? My main seems to max at around 350mb with three alts sitting at just less than 200mb

I have not noticed a memory usage increase since 3.0.2... my WoWs are using around 260MB each (around 300 for my main window which is at a higher resolution). Even after going to shatt and playing for an hour its still around 280MB/wow and 320MB for the main window.

Odd, with graphics at a minimum setting on all machines, only add-ons are Jamba, damage meter, and one other I can't remember on my alts (main has more add-ons) I'm sitting at ~420Mb per WoW instance (little higher for my main)

What do you have things set at so that it doesn't use so much?

Well for one I'm using XP - not sure what you're using. I feel sorry for all the Vista users, Vista is sucktastic, everything is slower and takes more memory to do the same thing that XP does.

Aside from that nothing special, my main window is 1280x960 with medium view distance, 2x anti aliasing, a few random things turned up slightly. My 4 clone windows are all behind the main window, 800x600 minimum everything except object distance is set at halfway.

From everything I've seen, people running vista are using about 1-2GB of memory just running vista, without even opening WoW. When I first boot my PC up, I'm only using something like 200MB of memory. I calculated my total memory usage after 1 hour playing 5 WoWs, with firefox open plus keyclone, and total memory used was around ~1.7GB (including what windows was using).

Just saying...whenever someone suggests a super fast PC or 8GB of memory or whatever, they're ALWAYS using Vista...XP doesn't seem to have any of the issues vista has in regards to hardware requirements to play 5 copies of WoW. I doubt I will ever upgrade to vista unless WoW requires it at some point, and then I might just switch to ubuntu and 5 box using that since we know its possible now.

Seems that problem was with my graphics card or with video setting to be more precise. Even tho i had video settings at medium-low, some setting caused my graphics to freeze. Now with everything set to low (or off when possible), i can run 5 WoW windows visible, main window @ 60 FPS, no problem whatsoever!

Now i can finally start leveling my 'all druid' team. :D

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by 'Nolife',index.php?page=Thread&postID=142779#post1 42779

Seems that problem was with my graphics card or with video setting to be more precise. Even tho i had video settings at medium-low, some setting caused my graphics to freeze. Now with everything set to low (or off when possible), i can run 5 WoW windows visible, main window @ 60 FPS, no problem whatsoever!

Now i can finally start leveling my 'all druid' team. :D

---

I finally started my 4 Druid team on Friday night. I'm running Vista32 with 2GB of memory, AMD +4400X2 and a ATI1900XT. I symlinked the data and interface folders and I can tell you that makes a large difference in performance. Before I did that I could barely make it through any capitol city but now I don't have much lag at all. Outside of the city it runs as smooth as if I was using one client.

Is it true that having four folders is worst than having the folders symlinked?

Also which folders should be symlinked to increase performance?

I just have four separate folders. I guess I could really go with 2 (one for the main and one for the slaves). I dont care about high graphics settings and addons for all the slaves, I barely look at those screens.

Thanks

P.S. Since 3.0 patches have come out - my computer has really sucked. It was amazing before the patch tho. I have another video card on order. I dont count on blizzard to fix the issues any time soon. When BC first came out it sucked for a while also.

The way I did it was by making one folder for each client I run. I then deleted the Interface and Data folders from each "slave" folder. By symlinking the data and interface folders from the primary folder to the slaves it cuts down on how much work your hard drive is doing therefore increasing your performance. It makes each client access just one folder instead of four at the same time.

in reply to memory problems.. memory is used equally by each window no matter how many you have just multiply it. however what makes the difference in memory use is addons. for your slave accounts disable any info addons ect. quest helper is gone, along with things like auctioneer ect. (keep them on your main if you still want to use them) i myself use 305mb on my main window yet 257mb on each slave (5 accounts total). total performance is 2.23GB page file usage. i have windows XP (32bit) and 4 gigs of ram installed in the machine (well 3.25 as xp only recognises that much). basically disable any addons on your slaves that dont help you to multibox and you save your memory :P